more muted one-color washes?

[tizzylou]

I agree, I have found it fascinating to read this thread, and like Laurie, I appreciate the fact that both of you can articulate what you are saying so well. I am very antimated when talking so you usually need to see both my face and my hands to tell what I'm trying to get across.

Hollis

[~*mikie*~]

I talk with my eyes & hands as much as with my mouth!
mikie

2433751279_c450c04dac_m.jpg (29.04 KiB) Viewed 5128 times

[BeaT]

Can you find us some links to online photos? It might be easier. Or do you have access to a scanner? Email is much faster than surface mail.

Smart Jen -- and stupid me! I didn't think of scanning until much later.

You're right. Since we're in the digital age now, making it digital would be much easier and faster, not to mention cost-effective, and it'd be easier to diversify my source to multiple publications.

I've tried to find decent online galleries yet to no avail. Japanese publications do not put any salable content online, and makeup brand websites are all entirely built of super fancy flash and there's no way anyone who has no command of Japanese can navigate the sites. User generated contents are not difficult to find, but the amateur photography generally fails to convey the look and feel of the products. Which led to the idea of sending the mags to you instead.

My guess is that most of your Asian customers are better educated and familiar with Western/ US culture than average (hence the preference for mineral cosmetics, which are not yet popular or generally available, and the English proficiency) and mostly already out of college/ late teens, so I'd use publications aimed at this demographic as my primary source. Please allow some time for me to do some fieldwork and image selection; I'll try not to give my own preference too much weight and provide a more general survey of market trends and preferences. This will take about 10-14 days, I think. And instead of sending them via email, I'm partial to doing a public photo album, which further eliminates the problem of file size and also has the advantage of allowing everyone to comment on them.


And I'm very flattered by ladycattat et al.'s compliments, but, gawd, they're undeserved on my part. I'm imprecise (texture? finish? I'm not even sure what *I* meant now!) and verbose (unfortunate consequence of professional training); if anyone finds my expressions intelligible, it's all thanks to Jen's good patience and lucidity. : )

[JenW]

Wow! You all flatter me so much. I have been blessed with an eye for detail, and a determination to convey exactly what I mean in the written type. I must say, if you conversed with me in person, I am a jumbled mess! I often say things before I thoroughly think them through. Type allows me the privledge of the edit! I was meant to be a digital journaler, so I am thankful I was born in this age. A clean edit is also important to me. All that scratching out in previous eras whether in pen, pencil, or the use of white out would have driven me nuts- the paper would be a mess. Sorry if this is TMI.

[BeaT]

This is not to be humble, but it's a fact backed by years of concrete evidence that I'm a lousy communicator, both online and offline, with an inability to use plain language or describe anything with physical property, so it's pretty easy to deduce that if I'm being praised for being able to describe something as subtle as makeup, it's definitely not because of *my* language prowess.

I made repeated edits too, but suckers are suckers

And Jen's patience and determination to figure out exactly what the hell I meant are simply amazing; this really is beyond customer service. : )

[JenW]

BeaT-
I understand exactly what you are trying to convey. It may take a few tries to pin it down exactly, just because of the limits of this type of communication. I can't see your body language to go along with your words or hear the inflection in your voice. However, I think it is always worth the time to understand each other, whether it be makeup, or something bigger, as long as one wants to be understood.

Looking forward to the link to your gallery of photos! Since joining the SN Staff, I really have become interested in the makeup preferences far beyond my own skintone. There are a few books out there, but I think I learn more from blogs and actual people. Anything to help me do what I do even better is greatly appreciated.

[elianne]

One of my Japanese friends actually did email me a list of Japanese magazines which can be found online. They can be rather painful to navigate until you figure it out by trial and error (I can't read Japanese to save my life and my friend has gone back to Japan) and they take up quite a bit of bandwidth. Dug them out of my email so here they are:

http://www.biteki.com/
http://www.s-woman.net/maquia/top.html
http://www.joseishi.net/voce/index.html

Biteki is quite pretty to flip through if you have an actual hard copy. I don't know if Kinokuniya Bookshop brings them into the US but I have seen one or two copies before in the Sydney outlet.

I can ask around for Korean websites if anyone is interested.

[BeaT]

One of my Japanese friends actually did email me a list of Japanese magazines which can be found online. They can be rather painful to navigate until you figure it out by trial and error (I can't read Japanese to save my life and my friend has gone back to Japan) and they take up quite a bit of bandwidth. Dug them out of my email so here they are:

http://www.biteki.com/
http://www.s-woman.net/maquia/top.html
http://www.joseishi.net/voce/index.html

Biteki is quite pretty to flip through if you have an actual hard copy. I don't know if Kinokuniya Bookshop brings them into the US but I have seen one or two copies before in the Sydney outlet.

I can ask around for Korean websites if anyone is interested.

Thanks for the links, elianne : )

These three are the biggest beauty mags in Japan and are also widely available in Taiwan (no relation to Thailand, with which it's often mistaken), which is where I am. However, the contents available online are vastly different from what's in their physical publications, of which only a very limited preview is available online. The most important is, you'd not find makeup demos on their sites, only pictures of the products themselves.

Here are the linkable contents pages for the current issues of VoCE and MAQUIA:
VoCE http://i-voce.boxerblog.com/contents/
Go down a bit, and click on the page scans for slightly larger pictures

MAQUIA http://dpm.s-woman.net/maquia/200810/index.html?page=0
Click on the arrowed buttons on the upper right corner above the digital version to flip the pages.

MAQUIA has recently launched a beauty blogging site, but my impression after a random stroll is that there aren't plenty of posts on makeup (Japanese women, while meticulous with their makeup, are more enthusiastic about skincare) and those that are are generally accompanied by fuzzy photos taken with a camera phone.

Here's the blog index on the MAQUIA beauty blogging site: http://maquiaonline.com/maquia/100club_diary/index.html
The tiny profile photos provide a general impression of what is worn; however, no larger versions are available.
The ones with flawless alabaster skin are the beauty ideal.



I've got my hands on the latest issue of MAQUIA and have scanned the relevant pages, the ones with makeup demos that also serve to illustrate the general aesthetics, trends and the colors that work. Because most Japanese fashion rags have practical makeup features every now and then, I had never bought a single copy of Japanese beauty mag until a couple days ago. (Japanese beauty mags are intimidating hefty affairs that generally have more pages than their fashion counterparts.) Boy did I know how dedicated Japanese women are to their skincare routine! Only about 1/4 of the 372-page volume is about makeup, and a lot of them are about achieving the porcelain skin look with the various foundation application techniques.

Due to the spreading popularity of Korean TV dramas, Korean beauty brands and a few fashion mags have also gained new found influence in other (Asian) countries. As I don't watch TV and my knowledge of local pop culture is superficial, I have only a general, vague impression of what the current Korean makeup aesthetic is like (somewhat different from what I saw on my Korean classmates when I was in Canadian high school and college a few years back, btw). It seems to me that the preference for pale skin and light colors for both eyes and lips is shared (darker colors are often associated with sensualness -- and therefore sexual impudence, a value still much prejudiced against in women --, more advanced age or goth [very different from the Western goth in both culture and cultural significance]), but Koreans seem to be more into sheer, transparent colors with subdued but still obvious glimmers and metalics. Not that the Japanese don't like those, but these qualities seem more exaggerated in Korean products. (In my impression, that is.)

Because Korean mags didn't have a presence until a couple years ago, I don't quite know which ones to go to. I can ask a friend who's studying in Korea for suggestions, though given how little she cares about makeup, I doubt if she'd have offhand knowledge. It'd be great if elianne can provide some help here. : )

Back to the scan thing....

As the beauty mags prove less helpful than I expected, I'm going into fashion ones instead. As mentioned earlier, Japanese fashion magazines generally have irregular practical makeup features, and aside from that, because they're often produced with the objective of providing emulable examples (i.e., can be precisely copied in real life) for their readers, the makeup on the models also reflect what you'd see on the streets, which is useful for our purpose here, except that the faces are often too small for a clear picture, so I'd have to find the ones that are big enough to scan.

While I'm eclectic with my magazine purchases, including fashion ones, I've never paid so much attention to the makeup the models wear. To my surprise, though the looks proposed by each mag are sometimes radically different, the products used and colors preferred seem rather constant across the spectrum, and it's only the manners of application that are different.

To provide a more general overview, I'm using both the horizontal and the vertical approaches; horizontal by providing pictures gleaned from magazines intended for different audiences and aesthetics, and vertical by sampling older issues from the last couple years from my own collection. That way, SN can get a better idea of the current trends and general preferences and also what changes and what doesn't. : )


Oh, and a word on my Japanese -- it's rudimentary (still working on it for manga's sake), but good enough to have a general idea of things.

[BeaT]

Some updates on the scanning thing...

I've completed scanning the magazines I plucked out of my own collection and been looking for a proper place to store the pictures. Flickr's upload limit is somewhat too strict, yet browsing on Picasa isn't as convenient as on Flickr because you can't switch between different sizes/ resolutions. I tried Vox, but the picture quality is so deteriorated (over compression, I suppose?) it makes me feel that all the work I put into the scanning gets wasted... Maybe I'll spread them out between Picasa and Flickr. We'll see.

There's a typhoon (tropical/ subtropical hurricane) that lingered for several days so I didn't go out hunting for current issues of other titles. Now the typhoon is gone, there will be a few errands to run and I'll begin the next phase around Thursday.

While being stranded at home by the storm, I flipped through some current issues of US and European fashion mags, and quite to my surprise, the more wearable makeup looks worn by pale girls in various autumn fashion ads all have a very similar, if not identical, palette to what I've seen in the recent issues of Japanese fashion rags I own. As I mentioned previously, most Japanese fashion titles are here to provide practical examples to their readers, and I only scan from such titles, so this discovery is quite interesting. There really seems to be a synchronization of global fashion. (Some would call that homogenization and find that a fault. But let's spare the politics. I'm only here to describe what's happening. I'm not the cause.)

Albeit having been wearing makeup for a decade, I've not learned the proper name of each lipstick color category, whose rationale always seems to escape me, but light to medium dark mauve-ish and pinkish colors seem to be the trend fair women are picking up on this season. (I hope I've used the right color-descriptive words. Ugh.) For eyes, natural looks are in. Whether it's navy, emerald, pomegranate, light salmon, or even earth tones, there always seems to be a hint of slate, subdued and understated. The colors make me think of dusk, from early to late, a veil of shimmering hues. The real difference between the Japanese and the US/Euro looks lies in the manner of application. The Japanese approach is more prone to the light-handed side, though that look also seems prominent in Western Europe. (REMINDER: I'm only generalizing!) The look just captured by French fashion photographer Garance Doré in London is quite typical of this style http://www.garancedore.fr/2008/09/15/london/ (See first picture. The eye makeup is almost imperceptible.)


I'll post the URL of the gallery when things are more organized and settled. : )

For the moment, ciao!

[JenW]

Thanks Ladies for all the links. Now I just need a chunk of time to check it all out. I appreciate the effort you have put into this BeaT. Hopefully, it will educate us on the Japanese views as well as some of the Asian views of how cosmetics should look!